Meeting the Neighbor

“L.A. is my lady” sang Frank Sinatra some years ago. Well, Hollywood & Highland is my baby. I’ve lived a five-minute walk from the site of this spanking-new development for the last 21/2 years. I kept a concerned eye on the pregnancy, I was there at the birth, and now I’m watching as it takes its first tentative steps.

The merits (or otherwise) of the new shopping and entertainment complex, which looms like a big old-fashioned liner sailing on Hollywood Boulevard, are a chief topic of conversation among my friends. So far, most of them seem to see the whole enterprise as a bit of a lost opportunity, and certainly not a place they would frequent for the sake of it. But I’ve visited it three times, morning, afternoon and night, willing it to succeed.

Frankly, from the beginning, I thought that anything they built would be an improvement. I first visited Hollywood Boulevard on a trip from London almost 10 years ago and felt the profound depression common to any tourist who wandered farther than the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese. I was filming a documentary for British TV on horror writer Clive Barker, and we needed to shoot a weird, menacing landscape that conjured the dark side of the human psyche. The Boulevard was the perfect place. Sleazy beyond the call of duty and downright dangerous, it symbolized how far Hollywood had fallen. It felt like a place that had been abandoned by the world.

But the world came back in droves a few weeks ago, on Hollywood & Highland’s official opening day. I went to the opening-night gala concert in the new Kodak Theatre, and the boulevard was packed. Traffic was at a standstill, and it was good to have the illusion that one was in a living, breathing city center. Hollywood was coming home to Hollywood, so surely this meant glamour. Be-suited, I took my British friend Vanessa, who remembers the Boulevard from the days of the Brown Derby and who this night had dressed to the nines in a gold silk evening dress. Meeting across the street in the newly restored Pig & Whistle, we were as excited as kids at Christmas, all dressed-up with somewhere to go.

This was a mistake. The opening night was a resolutely drab affair. I should have known something was amiss when a couple of excitable tourists asked to take our picture, no doubt thinking that, like the Marilyn and Crocodile Dundee look-alikes hired to mill around and summon the magic of Hollywood, we were a couple of actors in period dress. Undaunted, we pressed on. The massive archway that leads to the theater from the street is impressive, though Kodak is obviously not given to self-effacement and its name, emblazoned on high, lends an unnecessary touch of vulgarity. We walked the route that presumably the stars will take on Oscar night toward the ceremony’s new home in the Kodak, past somewhat unwelcoming luxury goods shops that might make them, like us, feel as though they’re passing through an up-market airport mall.

Trying to keep our sense of occasion intact, we ascended the grand, sweeping Busby Berkeley-style stairway that led to ... nothing in particular. The theater foyers had a terribly underwhelming brown quality, with the muted colors and unadorned walls so characteristic of provincial conference centers. Surely, I thought, the home of the Oscars needed a fantastically grand reception hall, a place where the audience mingles in all its finery amid magnificent surroundings, a place that would put the show back into show business. But then I realized that, of course, that’s the part of the Oscar bash that TV audiences never see. Maybe acknowledging that it’s the red-carpet arrivals and the auditorium that the star struck of the world are privy to, the architects of the Kodak seem to have dispensed with the middle bit as an irrelevance.

At first glance, the auditorium is impressive. With its 3,300 seats, it is huge, but in that time-worn phrase, it manages to be intimate too. Our spirits were lifted, but then strangely, spent the rest of the evening slowly deflating. This might have been due to the seriously odd choice of performer--Russell Watson, a fellow countryman of mine who, as far as I can tell, is still unknown here. But after an hour or so, I realized that I was uncomfortable because the theater felt strangely inauthentic, like the set of a theater instead of a real one. The much-vaunted acoustics also had that somewhat flat, TV feel about them, rather as though one were listening to a very, very loud CD.

I left that night with a sense of foreboding. But not wanting to yield to it, I was back the following afternoon to sample the shops and get a sense of what the out-of-towners searching for Hollywood will find. I made my way to Babylon Court, the center of the development and the place most easily accessible from the street. This felt great. The crowd was big and obviously enjoying itself, and the court is open to the skies, so I didn’t feel that familiar gotta-get-outta-here rush. The two massive white elephants atop their columns have loomed large over the Boulevard for months and could have represented the world’s largest hostage to fortune. But for me, they worked brilliantly. Together with the elaborately decorated ceremonial arch that frames a view of the Hollywood sign, they gave the place a sense of grandeur and fun totally missing from such sterile destinations as the hideous Beverly Center.

The shops--Victoria’s Secret, Brookstones, various jewelry and clothes stores--offered an unspectacular and inevitable choice. Maybe, when all three levels are full (and given the recessionary temper of the times, this will be a real task), I will actually want to buy something here. For the time being, even with the presence of the Gap and its fellow chain stores, there’s the distinct sense that the mall is either too gift-oriented, or for that matter, too expensive. A nice big book shop (the current offering, Book City, is too small and specialized) and a food market would start to give the place a backbone, as well as a reason for residents to visit along with the expected hordes of tourists. I live on Formosa and Hollywood and would love to simply walk a few hundred yards for a carton of milk or to browse through magazine shelves in fun surroundings. We’re not talking big spending here, but it’s the locals who give a place its character.

Hollywood & Highland’s crowning glory is the view that comes when you climb the steps to one of the upper levels. We’re so unaccustomed to being up high in L.A. that the chance to walk around, look out at the city and watch the crowd below makes for one of the place’s best features. Standing on the third floor in the middle of one of the walkways that straddle the Babylonian archway, you can appreciate the full sweep of Hollywood from the distant sign in the hills right through to the El Capitan Theater on the south side of the Boulevard. It forced me to look anew at surrounding buildings, which I had stopped noticing. From this perspective, you can also take in the traffic winding down Highland, and it’s apparent that the development has had the effect of genuinely altering the landscape for the better. Hollywood itself, at least on this occasion, felt electric.

For me, this more than made up for my Kodak moment. I went back a third time, to see a movie at the new Chinese multi-screener (nice theater, shame about the movie) and then just to hang out and people-watch--a revolutionary pastime in L.A. In among the tourists crowding the food franchises, I spotted what seemed like a few like-minded Angelenos. Sure enough, they were resting actor/model/whatevers, simply passing the time.

For Hollywood & Highland to truly work, and I hope that it does, it can’t be given over solely to the plane, train and bus crowd, so this was reassuring. And--did I forget to mention?--I could smoke unhindered, too. The way things are going in L.A., any place that allows that, even if it is open-air anyway, gets my vote.